Video conferencing servers, operating in “continuous presence” mode, use a composite image to display some or all of the parties involved in a video conference. A composite image has two or more areas (or “regions”) of the display that show different video images from the different participants. Generally, this composite image may be constructed by a server and transmitted in real-time to the participants. This single composite image stream allows every participant to view all or a subset of the conference participants from their terminal during the video conference
While this system provides a useful communication system, it is inflexible. Sometimes the end user (or application) could better utilize one or more sub-regions from the composite image in preference to the entire composite image. For example, an end user may want to record any communications from one of the participants but disregard content from the other participants. Unfortunately, the server providing the composite image may not support the functionality required to provide different composite multimedia images to the different participants. Or, if the server does include that functionality, it is generally very expensive and causes the server to perform inefficiently.